Remembering to Find Amnesty for missed reviews
Hey,
Read more books. Let's see what I thought:
First up: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. The Teixcalaanli Empire rules a pretty large chunk of the galaxy, but it's not the only player. In a fairly desolate part of space, Lsel station manages a shaky peace with the Empire (mostly by dint of being too small to bother with). But now the Empire has come calling to request a new ambassador to replace the man Lsel sent over 15 years ago. Crucially, they aren't saying what happened to the previous ambassador.
Lsel has one piece of tech that Teixcalaanli (for cultural reasons) hasn't developed -- the ability to record another person't memory and personality and, upon death, those recorded memories are transferred to a similar device placed in a carefully matched volunteer's head. These recordings are not considered to be people per se and the volunteers retain control over their own thoughts and memories, but the chip acts as a source of "collective wisdom" the volunteer can call upon. The main administrators of Lsel have chips containing nearly 15 generations' worth of memory, wisdom, and understanding.
Mahit has been chosen to be the new ambassador. Aside from being intensely fascinated by Teixcalaanli language and culture, she's a very good psychological match for the former ambassador, but the former ambassador's only available recording is about 10 years out of date. And Mahit only had a few months to work on personality integration. And then something goes wrong with the chip when she discovers that her predecessor has died from some sort of "allergic reaction" and the stored personality has a bit of a meltdown.
So now she's on her own, in a culture she loves but has never really experienced, without any support to fall back on. So she'd better figure out who killed the ambassador and why before she's next.
I had a pretty good time with this book. Aside from a few interesting discussions around the memory chip, there's a lot of fun ruminating on how hard it is to be really fascinated with a foreign culture even though you can't really be a part of it. The writing was solid, the plot didn't drag, and the characters were interesting. Definitely worth checking out if you're looking for some scifi.
For more adventuresome scifi, you might want to check out Finder by Suzanne Palmer. You get a scruffy nerf-herder named Fergus Ferguson, professional Finder. He's been hired to track down and recover a starship Venetia's Sword. He tracks down the man who took it, Arum Gilger, to a distant mining system called Cernee. On his way to recover it, he encounters a feisty old woman riding a cable car with him. Then the car is attacked and Fergus gets tossed into the volatile local politics. Getting the Sword back is going to take a bit more effort than he expected.
Yeah, another pretty good book. Fergus has parental issues he struggles with in the book and...it's probably weakest part of the whole thing to be honest. The backstory is either too simple or too complex but either way it didn't get onto the page very adroitly. It's not a huge part of the book though. For the most part the book is action-packed and a pretty fun romp. I especially like the little map of Cernee system in the front. Most times you land on a planet or a space station -- here we've got a lot of asteroids joined together by tethers and it's a great change of pace. The system and it's quirks are well-described and it's fun to poke around.
Definitely some lighter, beach-reading sci-fi, but worth picking up all the same.
Finally, the final book in the Amberlough series: Amnesty by Lara Elena Donnelly. This series has been generally described as LeCarre meets Oscar Wilde and the first book was definitely in that mold. I was a little less impressed this time around. The thing about this series is that while it talks a good spy game, there's really almost no espionage and covert operations after the first book. Even LeCarre has spies doing spy work and in this series it's been pretty conspicuously absent.
Case in point -- the first book ends with a fascist dictator taking control of Amberlough. At the end of the second book, it seemed like we were finally about to jump off with exciting adventures in the third book. The third book jumps ahead five years and...the rebellion is over. The dictator was cast out of office and then shot, the ringleader of the rebels is dead off-screen, and now it's mostly the story of a family and a pair of lovers picking up the pieces and trying to move on. The book wants to focus on people and it does quite a good job at it, but the spy/crime thing is pretty overdone for the most part. Still, this did wrap up a few things nicely and ends the series on a pretty decent note.
I think the series is pretty good, but don't let the book blurbs convince you it's something it's not.
So that's what I've read lately. I'm happy that I seem to be picking up the pace a little bit.
later
Tom